Most Boring Photo Above 30,000 Feet

I recall attending a party in the early 1980's where the theme was "The Most Boring Slide Evening". Revellers were encouraged to sort through their carousels of kodachrome tranparencies and select slides that fitted certain categories.

My favourite was in the "Most Boring Slide Above 30,000 Feet" which featured the wingtip of an aircraft and a lot of cumulus clod and was entitled "Vietnam". You get the general idea of the hilarity of the evening,  but behind this was the social norm of sharing images with family and friends.

Family and friends were often subjected to packets of holiday snaps that were spread on the kitchen table after the photographer (and I use this term advisedly) had returned from a lengthy overseas experience - O.E.

As an article in The Telegraph recalls, few in those days would have envisioned a global photo sharing site which would grow to contain 5 billion photos.  A site with 35 million adherents who would willingly share their families and passions with complete strangers.

But this is of course what Flickr has done.  It has melded the desire to share images with the capability of social media and in so doing has created an online phenomonon.

As it ingests 3 million photos and videos each day Flickr can seem a bit of a monolith, even to those who upload the material. It has also significanlty contibuted to the craze for digital, amateur photography in a very postive way, without requiring a user to divulge their personal information.

Despite the ability to share photographs, most of the images stored on the site are viewed only by the person who uploaded them.

People who post images to Flickr do so under Creative Commons which means most of the photos are free,  but this hasn't stopped companies such as Getty Pictures approaching individual Flickr photographers and skimming off their best images for the Getty image database.

So what is the competion for the platform?  Photo Weekly records that Facebook is now receiving 6 billion photos a month which is more than Flickr's entire collection. See the infographic below, based on Pixable data, which gives a very clear indication of the placement of Flickr in the social media image pecking order.

Maybe the way to beat the Flickr opposition to is to start a "most boring photo above 30,000 feet' group!

Related articles

• Flickr Still Beats Facebook for Photographers (blogs.photopreneur.com)
• Flickr Stock - The Way Stock Photos Should Have Been (blogs.sitepoint.com)

The Internet Of Things

The emergence of a global data field and machines talking to machines without human intervention creates both challenges and opportunities.

There already more things on the internet than people. In 2011 there will be more than 5 billion devices connected to the internet and by 2020 the estimate is something like 22 billion but what does this trend mean?

These two 2010 videos from IBM demonstrate how our world has become one Global Common thanks to the Internet.

The world has always been a system of systems but now we can see actually it and, as our society is now more connected than in the past, and we can easily follow the implications of our actions and interactions, in real-time.

To be of practical use The Internet of Things needs to have both a critical mass of devices and a cloud infrastructure; we now have both of these.




Part One




Part Two

For those interested April 9 has been deemed "Global Internet of Things Day" by the EU-based Internet of Things Council.

Pachube is a data brokerage platform for the internet of things, managing millions of datapoints per day from thousands of individuals, organisations & companies around the world.

The platform is designed to allow things to "plug-in" to other things in real time so that, for example, buildings, weather stations, interactive environments, air quality monitors, networked energy monitors, virtual worlds and mobile sensor devices can all "talk" and "respond" to each other in real-time.

Related articles

• How the Internet of Things Helps Us Understand Radiation Levels (readwriteweb.com)
• How the Internet of Things is Changing the Way We Work (readwriteweb.com)
• European R&D advances 'internet of things,' hastens our Phildickian future (engadget.com)